While dhimmī legislation sought to impose a marginal legal status on the Jews, the openness that prevailed in the economic and cultural spheres offered them opportunities to integrate more fully into their surroundings. Few if any limitations were placed on Jewish commercial activity during the classical Geniza period, permitting Jews and Muslims to interact on an equal footing in their business dealings. Jewish commercial activity was also highly diversified, underscoring the absence of the kinds of restrictive measures that emerged in Europe and confined Jews there to a limited number of professions. The Geniza demonstrates that Jews were employed as professionals, as skilled artisans, as manufacturers of goods, as retail and wholesale merchants, and even as landowners and agricultural producers. And commercial partnerships involving Jewish and Muslim businessmen, by no means uncommon in the Geniza period, provided regular occasions for members of the two groups to form close personal bonds as they jointly pursued profit.71 As a fourteenth-century Muslim jurist, evidently feeling some anxiety about the trend, put it: “Becoming partners with [dhimmīs] leads to intermingling, and that, in turn, to friendship.”72
Jews also succeeded in transcending the limitations of their dhimmī status through various intellectual and cultural pursuits that were facilitated, in turn, by their willing embrace of the Arabic language, the vernacular of scholarly discourse in the Islamic world. By the tenth century Jews had thoroughly adopted the language of their Muslim neighbors, relying on it not only for everyday communication but also as their primary literary medium, even when composing works of a distinctively religious nature.73 When we find rabbinic authorities in the twelfth century discussing the permissibility of praying in Arabic we get a sense of how far the process of linguistic acculturation had actually gone.74 The Jews’ easy embrace of Arabic was surely encouraged by their assessment of its close affinities with Hebrew and Aramaic.75 Maimonides writes in Pirqei Moshe (Chapters of Moses), echoing what must have been a fairly common perception, that “all who know Arabic and Hebrew agree that they are without doubt one language.”76 Through Arabic, Jews gained access to the vibrant intellectual life of the Islamic Middle Ages, to Arabic literature and to the flourishing study of Greek philosophy and science. The study of philosophy, especially, took place in an intellectual climate and in physical settings that were religiously integrated, allowing dhimmīs and Muslims to find common cause in the quest for rationally based knowledge. Describing the interdenominational circles of philosophical study that thrived in Baghdad in the tenth century, Joel Kraemer writes: “Cosmopolitanism, tolerance, reason, and friendship made possible the convocation of these societies, devoted to a common pursuit of the truth and preservation of ancient wisdom, by surmounting particular religious ties in favor of a shared human enterprise.”77 And even when working in more religiously homogeneous settings, philosophers were nevertheless predisposed to a view of society that tended to minimize the significance of confessional differences, emphasizing, as they did, the value of man’s natural capacity for rational thought.
Medicine was another important field in which Jews could participate relatively unhindered before the middle of the thirteenth century.78 Jews and Muslims studied the medieval compendia of Galen’s works together, practiced their profession side by side, and valued one another’s scientific treatises. An illustrative example is Isaac Israeli (d. ca. 955), an Egyptian Jew who attended the founder of the Fatimid dynasty, ʿUbayd Allāh, trained Muslim students, and authored a number of well-regarded Arabic medical texts, including one on urine that was praised by an eleventh-century Muslim chronicler as “the most comprehensive work on the subject ever written, and by which [Israeli] gained superiority over all other writers.”79
There is even evidence, albeit of a more modest nature, of Jewish writers who composed belletristic works in Arabic, thereby earning reputations among contemporary Muslim poets and literary savants. Most of our information on these Jewish literati comes from the sixteenth-century Moroccan chronicler al-Maqqarī and reflects the situation in al-Andalus.80 But there is also the intriguing example of Judah al-Ḥarīzī (d. 1225), the Spanish-born writer and translator who left his homeland, traveled through the Near East, and ultimately settled in Aleppo. An eight-page biographical entry in an encyclopedia of Arabic writers by Ibn al-Shaʿār al-Mawṣilī (d. 1256) praises al-Ḥarīzī for being a “talented and erudite” poet, revealing that Jews who wrote in Arabic verse could indeed find a place in Eastern literary circles as well.81
But the adoption of Arabic was not simply a matter of exchanging one linguistic medium for another; nor, it may be argued, were forays into religiously neutral territory its most dramatic result. In espousing Arabic, Jews were also engaging in a wide-ranging process that produced “fundamental changes in the articulation of Jewish culture.”82 The scientific study of Hebrew grammar, for example, began among Jews living in Arabic-speaking lands who had internalized the linguistic pride and the systematic methods of linguistic analysis of their Muslim neighbors.83 And the first efforts to work out a consistent presentation of Jewish theology commenced only after Jews began to think according to the conceptual paradigms developed by the scholars of Arabic Kalām.84 Linguistic and cultural integration did not, therefore, automatically imply an attenuated commitment to the rigors of Jewish observance or a weakened connection to one’s community. Such a conclusion is reinforced not only by the permission extended to Arabic prayer, cited above, but also by the query of Joseph Ibn Jābir, an avid student of Maimonides’ Arabic-language Commentary on the Mishnah who had difficulty reading Hebrew and who wrote to the master asking if he intended to produce an Arabic translation of his Mishneh Torah. Maimonides had no such plans, but Ibn Jābir’s question remains a telling indicator of the extent to which deeply committed Jews could be integrated into their cultural and linguistic surroundings.85
Despite the opportunities for acculturation and the relaxed enforcement of dhimmī legislation during the early part of the Middle Ages, Jews nonetheless saw themselves as a distinct minority in the Islamic world. Even in the writings of those who most fully embody the attainments of Goitein’s “Jewish-Arab symbiosis” we find frequent references to the Jews’ distinct status. In a poem that urges God to sweep away the dominion of Islam, the Andalusian Hebrew poet and neoplatonic philosopher Solomon Ibn Gabirol (d. 1058) characterizes the Jewish people’s beleaguered state in terms that also recall the powerful symbolism of the Davidic line.86 “Your people sit in exile,” he writes, “surrounded by enemies who now say we have no king.”87 And a perception of the Jews’ lamentable condition is similarly evident in the alternate title of Judah Halevi’s Kuzari—The Book of Refutation and Proof on Behalf of the Despised Religion.
The most profound and best-known testimonial to this pervasive view, however, comes from the pen of Maimonides. In 1172 he addressed a letter to the Jews of Yemen offering them comfort as they confronted a wave of religious persecution and a crisis of faith. Surveying the history of the Jews’ experiences in Muslim lands, Maimonides wrote: “You know, my brethren, that on account of our sins God has cast us into the midst of this people, the nation of Ishmael, who persecute us severely, and who devise ways to harm us and debase us…. No nation has ever done more harm to Israel, and none has matched it in debasing and humiliating us. None has been able to reduce us as they have.”88
Maimonides, who had himself lived through a period of religious intolerance under the Almohad rulers of North Africa and Spain, wrote these words to relieve the suffering of his coreligionists in a moment of intense pain and to provide them with a theologically meaningful explanation for their travails. His comments, colored by personal experience and an understandable empathy for the plight of his addressees, should not, therefore, be taken as an impartial assessment of the position of the Jews in Muslim lands. They do, however, reflect the degree